Don't do the crime if you can't do the extra time
Our downtown rivals had an interesting piece over the weekend about disarray in the way the state prison system releases people who've served their time.
SACRAMENTO -- The counselor at Salinas Valley State Prison paid a surprise visit to Nicholas Shearin's cell with good news: He would go home in two days, after a decade behind bars.
She did not mention that he should have been freed eight months earlier.
Shearin was among as many as 33,000 state inmates whose sentences may have been wrong because they were not given all the time off they earned for good behavior and for working in prison.
Records obtained by The Times show that in August, the state sampled some inmate cases and discovered that in more than half -- 354 of 679 -- the offenders were set to remain in prison a combined 104 years too long. Fifty-nine of those prisoners, including Shearin, had already overstayed and were subsequently released after serving a total of 20 years too many, an average of four months each.
Shearin, 38, who is living with his parents in Hawthorne and looking for a job, went to prison for armed robbery. He received less than a third of the good-behavior credit he was due on a second crime, assaulting another inmate.
Shearin said he had told the corrections staff that he was entitled to more time off his sentence.
"I argued that point," he said. "I put in all the paperwork."
But "they did what they wanted to do at the Department of Corrections," said Shearin, who learned from a reporter that he had stayed in prison too long. "They just told me no."
For more, read the whole thing. This is serious stuff, too-- in addition to being completely unfair, it's not cheap to keep those folks locked up. The Times says it'll cost the state $44 million through the end of the fiscal year. And, if those prisoners start figuring out that they were walking the yard weeks after they would be supposed to be on their way, you think some might ring up their local attorneys at law?
Nice work by Mr. Rothfield on that one-- we'll keep an eye out to see if any reform follows.
And, as I was tripping around the Times not-very-search-friendly Web site (I found a 1990 article on Scientology and an abstract about porn star Savannah's suicide, but not that piece until I found an AP rewrite on our site that gave me the relevant terms I could search over at their site), I ran across another thought-provoking piece.
SACRAMENTO -- Three years after state officials promised to fix California's troubled juvenile prisons, advocates for incarcerated youths are urging a judge to appoint a receiver to take over a system they say remains tragically broken.
The plea came in a filing last week from lawyers who had settled with the state after suing to transform institutions they said treated children as hardened criminals without regard for their welfare. They contend that the state's Division of Juvenile Justice has missed dozens of court-ordered deadlines for change dating to 2005, making "a mockery of compliance" in six areas: education, safety, medical care, mental health, disabilities and sex-offender treatment.
Sara Norman, a lawyer with the nonprofit Prison Law Office, said in a filing before Superior Court Judge Jon S. Tigar in Alameda County that the state bureaucracy was incapable of reform. She compared the situation with the one faced by U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who in 2006 appointed a receiver to oversee medical care for adult prisoners.
The juvenile justice division's "failures are pervasive, severe and chronic," the brief says. "They impact the lives of youth throughout the system in every area of court-ordered reform.
"Youth on suicide watch are isolated and deprived of programming and human contact. Youth in restricted programs spend 20 hours or more a day in their filthy, dimly lit cells, released only for one hour of school a day or to exercise in a cage."
Read on here if you'd like. Now I realize that kids in prison aren't as popular as kids in pre-calculus, but let's think about this a bit. If the juvie system's that bad, are we really helping stave off future violence? Or are we just incubating people who will graduate to real, grown-up prison once they're out and re-offending?
Alright, that's enough question marks for one post. If any of you, dear readers, have answers to those or any other questions, please share.
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